Archive for February 2006

“Ever since Stephen Hawking showed that black holes evaporate,” says Seth Lloyd, an MIT physicist, “people have wondered about the stuff that comes out of them. Is it just garbage, or is it something else?” … Lloyd attempts to show that quantum information does escape black holes, and that this information is useful and can have lasting impacts on how we understand our universe.

An intriqing idea, if this theory could be tested, proven and accepted, it could make waves, and further our understanding of how (some) of the universe works. I also like the blurb at the end:

Not only does Lloyd believe that black holes can help physicists form a theory of quantum gravity, but he also thinks that final state projection shows how black holes can function as quantum computers. “It becomes a matter of putting information into a hole. The hole processes the information and spits it out through Hawking radiation.” Lloyd pauses, then continues: “We don’t know how to program a black hole, but maybe when we learn more about quantum gravity, we will be able to.”

I’d be the first in line for a quantum computer with a quantum singularity CPU. Although it would be hella expensive for sure. 😉

If an asteroid struck us in a year or more and you’re aware of this event which has yet to have taken place, there’s little if anything that could be done about it. Although there are usually enough eyes skyward that knowledgeable persons could calculate such an event. Despite that though, what would you do; what would I do? Personally, what things should you do, if death was not immediate? Which things would you regret? What would you be most worried about, besides the obvious loss of human life – loss of life… loss of loved ones, loss of the most precious and dearest loved one to your heart.

What things would cease to be a worry? What becomes trivial? What past transgressions would be deemed the most pathetic and meaningless? Soon and past spats with a spouse or partner fade and crumble to micro-dust. Which time-line events of your life would be the biggest waste of humanity; including the less obvious events that don’t presently spring to mind. Would life itself have been a waste of time? – Or would you positively see that life was lived to its fullest? Would you be chillingly aware of all your mistakes, including the deep underlying more subliminal ones? Will life have fulfilled its ultimate purpose? – Or would life have been nothing but a cosmic-sized hunk of spatio-temporal trash?

Would you rush to your loved one first? Would your loved one rush to you? At the same exact moment in time? Minds linked: thoughts, feelings, amassed and exchanged. Hurtful phrases of the past uttered under varied states of emotion – biochemical stimulations; chemically altered situations – long forgotten. Caustic words spoken at truth serum trials of honesty, and hurtful dramatized statements of falsehood, pooling in the well of evanescent mishaps festering and stirring casting a gloomy bane over existence and threatening to curdle over and swallow you in one expansive gulp. I’m at life’s curdling point of no return. The expansive aperture so close, I cannot see its rim. . .

Ever since physicists invented particle accelerators, nearly 80 years ago, they have used them for such exotic tasks as splitting atoms, transmuting elements, producing antimatter and creating particles not previously observed in nature. With luck, though, they could soon undertake a challenge that will make those achievements seem almost pedestrian. Accelerators may produce the most profoundly mysterious objects in the universe: black holes.

When one thinks of black holes, one usually envisions massive monsters that can swallow spaceships, or even stars, whole. But the holes that might be produced at the highest-energy accelerators–perhaps as early as 2007, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva starts up–are distant cousins of such astrophysical behemoths. They would be microscopic, comparable in size to elementary particles. They would not rip apart stars, reign over galaxies or pose a threat to our planet, but in some respects their properties should be even more dramatic. Because of quantum effects, they would evaporate shortly after they formed, lighting up the particle detectors like Christmas trees. In so doing, they could give clues about how space-time is woven together and whether it has unseen higher dimensions.

Hoping to unlock the mysteries of black holes and the Big Bang, a team of scientists from Japan and seven other countries has apparently detected its first neutrinos in a multiyear project underway in Antarctica.

The project, dubbed “IceCube,” was launched in 2002, but only detected its first neutrinos on Jan. 29, recording the faint flashes of light given off by the particles when they interact with electrons in water molecules, team member Shigeru Yoshida, a cosmic-ray physics professor at Chiba University, said Thursday.

Weblog: Big problems in small packages, 02/16/06In the search for security, it’s dawning on IT professionals that it’s the small things that matter now. Those handheld smartphones with huge amounts of data storage, USB flash drives, millions of powerful computer widgets spreading insect-like across …

Weblog: Guest blogger at RSA hears Counterpane CTO, 02/16/06Bruce Schneier’s mother doesn’t give a hoot that her home PC is overrun with spyware excepting for the few days immediately following his biannual visits during which he rids her machine of malware. Nevertheless, the CTO of Counterpane Internet …

DHS: Sony rootkit may lead to regulation, 02/16/06A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official warned Thursday that if software distributors continue to sell products with dangerous rootkit software, as Sony BMG Music Entertainment recently did, legislation or regulation could follow.

Secure
software is up to businesses, 02/15/06Most businesses aren’t doing enough to build and buy securely written software, according to speakers at panel of corporate security executives, academics and professional
software developers speaking at the RSA Security Conference 2006 on Tuesday.

“It belongs to the Neolithic period, about which we know very little regarding the use of metals, particularly gold,” she said. “The fact that it is made of gold indicates that these people were highly advanced, producing significant works of art.”

She said the pendant, measuring rough 1 ½ by 1 ½ inches, was picked up last year near the town of Ptolemaida, about 90 miles southwest of the northern city of Thessaloniki. Karamitrou-Mendesidi is to present the artifact at a three-day archaeological conference that opened Thursday in Thessaloniki.

Heeyy… I knew I dropped that darn thing somewhere over there. 😀 Article has a pic, not real impressive to look at, but the fact that people in this region were working with gold suggests they were quite knowledgeable, which is cool I guess, was never any good at history.. heh.

Beyond Neptune’s orbit, about four billion miles from the sun in the vicinity of Pluto, lies the Kuiper belt, a ring of comets circling our solar system. Discovery of oversized rivals to Pluto, essentially giant comets, have shaken up our ideas about the Kuiper belt in the last decade. Most recently, the confirmation in a recent Nature study that one of these jumbo icebergs is bigger than Pluto has threatened to expand our solar system’s planetary ranks, a subject of heated debate among astronomers.

Now, a study in The Astrophysical Journal finds that the “10th planet,” discovered last year and named UB313, has a moon, just like Pluto. But that study, led by UB313 discoverer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, also took a look at more moons in the Kuiper Belt. And it suggests that the whoppers of the comet ring formed differently than regular comets.

Yeah yeah, no personal rants in a while, ey? Guess I don’t consider my life that interesting. One major thing though, my sister that has been in DCF custody since being disowned by our biological mother will soon be staying with us for good instead of just visiting. Her birthday is next weekend and that’ll be when she gets to stay but it’ll be a surprise. My family and I all got her some gifts, even my girlfriend got her things, how sweet she is. 🙂 Speaking of which I treated my girlfriend to a nice dinner today since we’re not going out on Valentine’s Day. 😉 Also been praticing drums with my bro’s band, I am not a very confident person, but I guess I’ve improved a tad in a short time, but it will take loads of time to get anywhere near good. There’s a snow storm on its way for tonight tomorrow too, 10-15″ so they say… that’s likely going to cause a headache when we usually have practice on Sundays. We’ll see I guess. At this point I don’t much care, wouldn’t mind just staying in bed with my cold that keeps creeping back up on me. 🙁

Could be more detialed, but lazy and tired. Perhaps I’m too private and boring for an in depth personal blog. :p

The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s in 1922 contains five sarcophagi with mummies, breaking the nearly century–long belief that there’s nothing more to find in the valley where some of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs were buried.

Egypt’s antiquities authority has said only that the single-chamber tomb contains five wooden sarcophagi, in human shapes with colored funerary masks, surrounded by 20 jars with their pharaonic seals intact — and that the sarcophagi contain mummies, likely from the 18th Dynasty, some 3,500-3,300 years ago.

“Perhaps as one of the first high profile uses of Alexa’s WebSearch Platform, the U.S. government plans to search, link and reference every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations. Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes. Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images with tech recently used at the Superbowl.”

Feds are at it again and again, looking to take away more freedom of speech and personal opinions. It’s getting so that you can hardly express yourself about certain things without being criminally suspect. Plus you just know this ‘AI’ is going to suck, don’t see how they’ll spider absolutely everything, there’s millions of blogs out there alone, new ones popping up all the time. Plus there maybe some unlisted underground sites, along with other modes of communication which I’m sure they’ll overlook completely.

Planets might exist around a blazing hot star so big its diameter exceeds the orbit of Mars, astronomers said Wednesday.

“These extremely massive stars are tremendously hot and bright and have very strong winds, making the job of building planets difficult,” said study leader Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Our data suggest that the planet-forming process may be hardier than previously believed, occurring around even the most massive stars that nature produces.”

In a galaxy filled with billions of stars, scientists searching for alien life need some way to pick out those which are most likely to harbor habitable planets and moons. For more than 150 years, an important tool in this screening process has been the concept of a “circumstellar habitable zone.”

An interesting article which mentions Extremophiles (organisms that thrive in harsh environments) like ones found here on Earth, could very well exist on some of the active moons in the solar system. The story also asks the question, “are planets orbiting red dwarfs habitable?” This debate started since the recent discovery of a small, rocky world in orbit around a red dwarf 28,000 light-years from us. Since then most scientists largely ignored these types of stars, assuming no life could be found orbiting them.

This dramatic spiral galaxy is one of the latest viewed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Stunning details of the face-on spiral galaxy, cataloged as NGC 1309, are captured in this color image. NGC 1309 was home to supernova SN 2002fk, whose light reached Earth in September 2002. NGC 1309 resides 100 million light-years (30 Megaparsecs) from Earth. It is one of about 200 galaxies that make up the Eridanus group of galaxies.

I’m always in awe of the images the Hubble space telescope continues to discover and capture with its keen resolution.